Robert John Ardiff: ‘I like it where you have the dirt on the tape’

There is something of the travelling troubadour about Robert John Ardiff. When he talks about his time living in Barcelona, Lisbon, Rome and Croatia, it’s clear he’s an artist who will go wherever he feels he needs to be to nourish his creativity.

It began when the songwriter moved from his home in Co Meath to Dublin, “and then Dublin got too small”. So he gathered some essentials for a musician on the go – underwear, passport, portable recording equipment, sense of humour – and headed off. “Once you start on that path, one place leads to another. They’re not necessarily planned steps. It’s actually similar to the making of the album,” he says.

That album is Once I Was, Ardiff’s newly released third solo work, which follows on from Between the Bed and Room, from 2018, and The Corridors of Love, from 2021. It highlights his way not just with a narrative throughline but also with folk-pop sophistication.

He likens the album’s origins to a chance unearthing that sets you on an adventure. In this case the catalyst was an old Spanish guitar that he found in his parents’ attic. Its neck was slightly splintered, so he brought it into a music shop in Dublin to be repaired.

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When he took it home and played it he felt an instant connection. The guitar’s sound was “nothing amazing”, he says, “but I like it where you have the dirt on the tape”. In other words, the instrument’s imperfections matched the sounds he wanted for his songs.

“It’s something that intrigues me about music, about somebody sitting in a room playing their instrument – it’s a very organic thing. You often hear about musicians playing an instrument they wouldn’t normally yet they get so much more out of it than if they stuck to what they usually play. There’s a different resonance to it. I normally play a Gibson SG, which is about 20 times better than the guitar I found in my mother’s attic, but the imperfections of it stood out.”

Another element of Once I Was is its series of loosely linked travelogues. Whenever Ardiff settled into a new European town or city he would take out his four-track recorder. “I was just meeting people, other musicians or friends or actors. One thing would lead to another,” he says, “and I’d record these people.”

So the album includes snippets of singers from Barcelona and Rome, and of a musician in the eastern French town of Dole. “A musician friend of mine in Dole introduced me to a trumpet player, and one night we just set up the four-track in the room and pressed record. He played some beautiful trumpet pieces, and we sampled bits of them.”

As well as his solo work, Ardiff has been collaborating with the Irish filmmaker John Carney, both on On Modern Love, Carney’s Amazon series – his track People Talking, which has clocked up more than eight million Spotify streams, plays while “Anne Hathaway is eating, or crying into, her bowl of porridge”, says Ardiff – and on Flora and Son, the director’s latest film.

When Carney was developing the movie, he asked Ardiff for a song that “may or may not work as a duet” between the characters of Flora (played by Eve Hewson) and her online guitar tutor, Jeff (played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt). “He sent me the chords and I went away, wrote four verses of a call-and-response between Jeff and Flora, and then sent them back to him.”

Hewson, Gordon-Levitt, Carney and his regular song cowriter Gary Clark then “went into the studio with my bare bones of the lyric, the verses, the chorus, and then shaped it”. The influence, says Ardiff, was the John Prine and Iris Dement duet In Spite of Ourselves. The result was Meet in the Middle, a folk-pop song of no small charm that is typical of Ardiff’s natural inclination for tuneful subtlety.

Does all of this work mean he has settled in Dublin for good? Ardiff has been back in the city for some years, but he would have no problem heading away again, he says, especially as even millions of Spotify plays aren’t enough to keep him safe from a degree of financial bruising. It helps that one of his default positions as a musician is not to obsess over the details – in other words, he’ll be grand.

“Rather than trying to track everything, should it not just be a bunch of people in a room making music in an atmosphere where you can hear the chair creaking? I’m comfortable in that situation.”